Ask HN: General API for accessing bank transactions?

[aykhm]

I currently track expenses monthly by downloading credit card/checking account statements as CSVs and importing into excel. It's a bit annoying as I have to 1. wait for statements to post so I can't track the current month and 2. statements don't line up exactly with calendar months.

I'm looking for a general way to access transactions across all my banks, but the ones I've found all have some issues.

- Plaid: seems oriented more for businesses and isn't very friendly for personal use. They do have a personal use version but it doesn't support certain banks (e.g. Chase)

- Teller.io: unfortunately doesn't support one of my accounts (Bilt)

- Fintable.io: syncs transactions to airtable/google sheets which maybe could work, but doesn't have a simple API.

Am I missing any alternatives? Plaid supports all the institutions I want but getting setup as a non-business seems to require too many steps. Maybe any consumer-facing wrappers around Plaid's API?

[phoenixy1]

Plaid does support personal use (including personal use access for Chase). I'd actually be interested in seeing where you saw that it doesn't support Chase for personal access so I can make sure our messaging is clear and consistent on that front!

It's true that the current onboarding flow is not designed for personal use cases; we're currently in the middle of revamping it to make it less onerous for non-business users. In the meantime, I recommend you just fill out the questionnaire as well as you can. We know that some of the questions don't really make sense in a personal use context -- just try to answer them to the best of your ability and you should be fine.

[aykhm]

I saw that there is a limited production mode, but it doesn't support institutions such as BofA or chase (https://plaid.com/docs/sandbox/#testing-with-live-data-using...). I submitted the questionnaire for production access and got access, but it says it will be revoked unless I complete a list of security attestation requirements.

Seems like the barrier to entry seems a bit high for personal use. Even with production access, I can't just link my bank accounts and use the API right as I would have to setup authentication and Link myself right? Looking forward to see more about the revamp, though.

[phoenixy1]

Thanks for the details! Glad to hear you've got full Production access -- if any of the security attestation requirements seem unreasonable for your use case, feel free to reach out to us directly (you can email me at [e-mail] and let me know you're the person in this thread) so we can look into it.

You do need to set up Link, but it's pretty easy. The Tiny Quickstart(https://github.com/plaid/tiny-quickstart) has a bunch of minimal examples. If that's too much we have a super-minimal, no-code set of instructions for making API calls in the Postman Quickstart (https://github.com/plaid/plaid-postman?tab=readme-ov-file#ma...).